mystery does not occupy space | description

A memory is a luminous miniature, like the hologram of the princess, in that movie, that the faithful robot carried in his circuits from galaxy to galaxy.  The sadness inherent in any memory comes from the fact that its object is forgetting.  All movement, the great horizon, the journey, is a spasm of forgetting which bends in the bubble of memory.  Memory is always portable, it is always in the hands of a wandering automaton.

– César Aira, The Seamstress and the Wind

[Early humans] understood the isolated unit (in contrast to the eurythmic series that surrounds it) as a symbol of authority and wholeness… The memorial was used very early as a monument to designate a consecrated space.  Originally, it was a mound.  Memorials of this kind, usually burial places of fallen warriors and leaders, are the oldest monuments to be found almost anywhere on earth.

– Gottfried Semper, Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or, Practical Aesthetics.

In order to study architecture, one must … practice the art of exhumation.

- Neza Regarestrani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials

One of the most profound investigations of modern culture deals with the relationship between the solid and void, between presence and absence: within the space of the page, the silence between musical notes, or the degree zero of representation.  The central concern of this studio is to investigate the ways of architecturally manufacturing those voids.

For this studio, we will explore Gottfried Semper’s two central elements to the making and definition of architectural space: the mound and the fabric.  The first, in landscape, will become the ungrounding of the earth and its becoming or emerging into (an)other.  The second, as Adolf Loos would allude to, is of defining space and its effects through carpets or materially rich planimetric forms reminiscent of fabrics.  These will all find expression in the architecture + site, their materiality, and their spatial development.

The aim of the studio is to explore and to give form and architectural intentions to these (of ungrounding, of the void, of enclosure, etc.) through representational and discursive strategies (textual, graphic, three-dimensional, composite, etc.).  As a point of departure we will utilize representation to alter and modify our perceptions and understandings of the world to centralize the void and enclose through textiles.

Programmatically, the studio will articulate these through a proposed addition + expansion to Nelson Bayardo’s 1962 Municipal Columbarium in Montevideo, Uruguay.